Tory GB News Backing - It’s Official

As new media marketplace entrant Gammon Broadcasting News (“Bacon’s News Channel”) opened for business last weekend, there will have been some in and around the Government of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson who were relishing the prospect of seeing the Overton Window shifted even further to the right. There would be no official backing, though: that would be a little too obvious.

Oliver Dowden

But as viewing figures have declined over the week, and the shortcomings of the new operation - technical foul-ups, total lack of research, poor guest selection and occasionally clueless presenters - have led to it becoming a new comedy genre, thanks to the Twitter feed called @GBNewsFails, the Blue Panic Button has been pressed.

The minister being given his orders to go out and make a futile gesture - and a complete idiot of himself - is Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, who has been dutifully reported by the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph going over the top in no style at all, declaring that advertisers choosing of their own free will not to be associated with GB News, and those freely advocating such action, are “A threat to democracy”.

Oh what a giveaway! Would Sir like to be properly even handed and tick off all those people who have been urging advertisers to withdraw their product placements from sites like The Canary or Novara Media? Benjamin Cohen was thinking along those lines as he responded “Hi [Oliver Dowden] I’ll be writing to you as a constituent and the CEO of [Pink News] to see how you could help increase the advertising sales of other media too”.

As for the idea that organisations deciding not to advertise with one or other broadcaster heralded the end of democracy, Jolyon Maugham mused “Not sure it quite compares with proroguing Parliament”. Steve Peers added “Or breaking electoral law, curbing judicial review, restricting public protest, making the electoral regulator (more) powerless, or encouraging public hatred of judges, lawyers, foreigners and political opponents …”.

Some expressed concern at Dowden’s apparent partiality, and Nuwan Dissanayaka was one of them: “Do you really think it’s your place to intervene like this? Isn’t it entirely up to the brands themselves to choose who they think is appropriate? If it’s not your bias then please point us to a similar intervention you’ve made on behalf of a left wing concern”.

He could be in for a long wait. But this is all so revealing: especially in the wake of the Chesham and Amersham by-election shock last week, the right-leaning part of the media establishment has become spooked by the idea that Bozo may be rather less popular than they had led their readers, viewers and listeners to believe. Interventions by the campaigners at Ripples and Stop Funding Hate have spooked them yet more.

As the people at Ripples have concluded, “Culture secretary Oliver Dowden is defending GB News again, this time in the Sunday Telegraph. He intervened earlier in the week as well. They have had a parade of cabinet ministers on air all week too. The support for this project is coming from the top of the government”. GB News isn’t an insurgent or outsider operation. It’s the same establishment piss in a differently labelled bottle.

Hence the establishment panic at the thought that GB News might just expire in a chorus of derisive laughter. Free market upstart my arse - another Trojan Horse more like.

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